Our Operational Impact Carbon and Energy

Carbon Neutrality

We have pledged to be carbon neutral from fiscal year 2015 onward. This commitment includes global direct Scope 1, indirect (market-based) Scope 2 and Scope 3 business travel emissions.

In 2017, we again achieved our carbon neutrality commitment through the implementation of our Carbon Reduction Framework, which prioritizes energy reduction initiatives across our facilities and enables the procurement of renewable electricity (Green-e certified RECs and Guarantees of Origin) and high-quality certified carbon offsets that support the growth of renewable energy markets where we operate. In doing so, we continue to explore the evolving marketplace of green power purchases and carbon offsets. We are taking a measured approach to build a portfolio of diverse assets at practical cost with:

As part of our Carbon Reduction Framework, we factor an internal price on carbon into energy efficiency, renewable energy and other emission reduction activities through the use of a return on investment model. This return on investment model prioritizes internal reduction measures across both our offices and data centers.

Renewable Energy

We are committed to procuring 100% renewable electricity to meet our global needs by 2020, which enables us to achieve carbon neutrality while supporting the expansion of renewable energy projects. Our strategy focuses on reviewing direct renewable energy sourcing opportunities, like long term power purchase agreements and when this is not feasible, procuring high-quality, credible renewable energy certificates.

In 2017, we have continued our procurement of Green-e certified RECs to cover 100% of our US and Canadian operations, as well as Guarantees of Origin for 100% of European operations. Additionally, we achieved 100% renewable electricity procurement for our Brazil and China operations through the purchase of I-RECs and covered 95% of our India operations through PowerPlus instruments. Having achieved these milestones, our total procurement of certified renewable energy credits was equivalent to 95% of our global electricity needs in 2017.

Long Term PPA (Power Purchase Agreement)

In June 2017, we signed a Long Term PPA (Power Purchase Agreement) to spur renewable energy growth and jobs. The agreement enabled the investment and development of a new 68 megawatt wind project in Pennsylvania and is set to facilitate up to 150 construction jobs and result in the reduction of more than 200,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year once operational. The wind plant is set to open in 2019. Read more in the PPA Press Release.

ReNew Power

To date, we have invested nearly $370 million in ReNew Power, helping establish the first dedicated renewable energy developer in India to surpass 1 gigawatt in commissioned wind and solar projects. In 2016, we signed a long-term power purchase agreement which enabled ReNew to build a 50-megawatt solar power plant. Together with existing wind capacity, this is expected to meet up to 70 percent of the electricity needs of our Bengaluru campus, equivalent to 14 million kilowatt-hours.

Energy Efficiency

In 2017, we surpassed our 2020 goal of a 10% absolute reduction by reducing our usage by 13% from a 2013 baseline across our operationally-controlled facilities. We will continue to pursue further energy reductions through the utilization of our Carbon Reduction Framework.

Maximizing the Efficiency of Our Offices

Optimizing existing buildings

We completed several energy efficiency projects in our global offices in 2017, and commenced several others. We invested approximately $1.7M in energy efficiency retrofits that will result in annual carbon savings of over 2,200 metric tons. Some examples of our projects include:

Additionally, we received the Climate Leadership Award in the Innovative Partnership category , for our work with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories and the Building Energy Exchange and in creating a Living Lab at our corporate headquarters by retrofitting lightings, shading and controls to pilot new technologies and promote continuous innovation. The most effective solutions developed have been released in a white paper that outlines key findings from the Living Lab, including ways to decrease operating costs, lower energy use and reduce a building’s carbon footprint.

Using space smartly

We have increased the efficiency of our real estate by adopting the Global Workplace Standard. As a result, we have decreased the floor area per seat by 25 percent or more, resulting in reduced energy costs and material use.

The Global Workplace Standard includes an open floor design and reduction of enclosed offices. Desks are located along the perimeter, and offices along the building core. These efforts enhance our operational efficiency, promote collaboration and communication by increasing our people’s access to each other and improve our working environment by increasing access to daylight and views.

We are also adopting a new workplace approach to support our flexible work patterns. Currently, more than 5,000 of our people have adopted this new way of working across multiple divisions and locations. Implementing this workplace approach will provide additional variety and choice of work settings while further decreasing the floor area per staff allocation, which increases our energy efficiency.

Deploying new technology solutions

Desktop Power Management: Our power-management solution, which is deployed on approximately 40,000 Desktop Client PCs across our offices, saves an estimated $1 million annually on power and associated cooling costs.

Reducing the Impact of Our Data Centers We work to maximize the operational efficiency of the building infrastructure and technology systems in our data centers by consolidating facilities, by driving efficiency in how we power and cool them and by optimizing the efficiency and utilization of technology equipment.

Data Center Efficiency

We continue to seek out efficiency opportunities by exiting older inefficient facilities, migrating our application servers to new data centers that provide lower power usage compared to legacy facilities and by championing greater efficiency across our data centers. We have also adopted the use of high-efficiency modular data centers globally: pre-fabricated “data centers in a box” which houses servers and the data center infrastructure in secure shipping-container-sized modules. Adopting these modular data centers allow us to scale our operations more efficiently, and further advance our broader commitment to environmental stewardship and carbon reduction for our global operations.

Server Power Management

All new servers deployed in our data centers are configured with optimized power management settings that significantly reduce power consumption during periods of low server utilization.

Driving Efficiency in Our Technology Sustaining the growth of our business, while minimizing the environmental impact of our technology, is a constant balancing act. As a financial services firm, computing represents the largest portion of the environmental impact from our technology. Through a combination of market-based and in-house developed products, our engineers seek the best technology solutions with the lowest power consumption to meet the requirements of our business, working alongside the CSRE team to achieve the firm’s operational goals.

Shared Solutions

We will seek additional efficiency in our computing solutions through shared computing and virtualization. For example, while we utilize private cloud solutions that right-size our computing resources for applications, we will also leverage public cloud technology as secure solutions become available, including using on-demand computing capacity as needed to reduce our permanent computing footprint.

Innovation and Collaboration We look to adopt innovative solutions across our technology platforms and share best practices across the industry. For example, we have adopted modular data centers and are actively engaged as a member of the Open Compute Project (OCP), which promotes the development of higher-efficiency server hardware.

Open Compute Project

Goldman Sachs senior technologists are actively working with a broad consortium of industry members in the Open Compute Project (OCP), to innovatively design the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest cost. OCP’s philosophy of standardizing hardware, managing at scale, and driving towards energy efficiencies has benefited Goldman Sachs and other data center users across industries enormously and we intend to continue to engage and benefit broadly.

As part of Goldman Sachs’ commitment to clean energy, the firm entered into a Power Purchase Agreement with NextEra Energy Resources that will enable the development of a new 68 megawatt wind project in Pennsylvania. Watch Video